Have you ever tried to keep track of numbers that seem to be changing? Well, when things happen in different frequencies or occur at different intervals, this can be tricky to record. Tania and Alex have been growing a garden.

As summer passes, the vegetables in Tania and Alex’s vegetable garden have been growing nicely. In fact, they have so many vegetables that they don’t know how they are going to have enough time to work on everything that needs to be done. Because having a garden is more work than they imagined, Tania and Alex have asked some of their friends to help them in the garden. Alex read an article in the newspaper about CSA’s, community supported agriculture. This is when people work on a farm and get some of the vegetables in exchange for their efforts. Tania and Alex have decided to do the same thing. They have offered their friends vegetables in exchange for their work. Now instead of two people working in the garden, they have seven. To be sure that everything gets done, they decide to keep track of how many people they have working in the garden each day. For two weeks, Alex and Tania keep track of how many people are working in the garden on each day. Here are their results.

2, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 1, 2

To get everything done in the garden, Tania and Alex know that at least three people need to be working on each day. When they look at the information they can see that this is not always the case. Tania wants to organize the information so that she can share it with the group. To do this, she will need a frequency table.

Use this Concept to learn all about frequency tables and how to create them.

Guidance

What is
data
?

Data is information, usually numbers, connected with real life situations. If we were going to count how many people came to an amusement park in one day, the number of people that we counted would be the data.
What does it mean when we organize data?
Organizing data means organizing numbers taken from real world information. For instance, if we use the example above, we would be taking the counts of the number of people who visited the amusement park and writing them in a way that is easy to read.

There are lots of different ways to organize data so that it is easy to read.
One way of organizing data is to use a
frequency table.
A frequency table is a table that shows how often something occurs.
First, we count or keep track of information, then we take that information and put it into a table with different columns.

John counted the number of people who were in the shoe store at the same time, in one day. Here are his results:

1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8

We call this data
organized data
because it is in numerical order and isn’t all mixed up. When we have information or data like this, we can examine or
analyze
the data for patterns. You can see here that the range of people who were in the store was between 1 and 8. No more than eight people were in the shoe store at the same time on this particular day.

We can put this information into a
frequency table.
A frequency table is a chart that shows how often something occurs.
For this problem, we will look at the frequency of people entering the store.
To do this, we want to look at how many times one person was in the store, how many times two people were in the store, how many times three people were in the store, etc.
Here is our table.
Notice that it has two columns. Column 1 is named “Number of People Who Were In the Store” and Column 2 is named “Frequency”.

Number of people who were in the store

Frequency

1

2

2

1

3

1

4

2

5

2

6

2

7

2

8

1

Whenever we want to see how often something occurs, we can do this by building a frequency table.

Now let's practice.

Example A

Here is information about the number of dogs counted in the dog park over five days.

4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8

Solution:

Number of dogs

Frequency

4

3

5

6

6

4

7

2

8

2

Example B

Here is the number of children who entered the park throughout the day.

1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8

Remember to include 6 in your chart even though there weren’t six children who entered the park. You would enter a 0 for the frequency of 6 children.

Solution:

Number of Children

Frequency

1

2

2

1

3

1

4

1

5

2

6

0

7

2

8

1

Example C

Here are the number of people who bought ice cream in one hour.

5, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 9

Solution:

Number of people

Frequency

5

3

6

1

7

4

8

0

9

1

Remember Tania and Alex and the garden? Well, now it is time to help Tania to create a frequency table and a display that shows the data she collected about the number of workers in the garden each day.

Let’s look at the problem once more.

As summer passes, the vegetables in Tania and Alex’s vegetable garden have been growing nicely. In fact, they have so many vegetables that they don’t know how they are going to have enough time to work on everything that needs to be done. Because having a garden is more work than they imagined, Tania and Alex have asked some of their friends to help them in the garden. Alex read an article in the newspaper about CSA’s, community supported agriculture. This is when people work on a farm and get some of the vegetables in exchange for their efforts. Tania and Alex have decided to do the same thing. They have offered their friends vegetables in exchange for their work. Now instead of two people working in the garden, they have seven. To be sure that everything gets done,
they decide to keep track of how many people they have working in the garden each day. For two weeks, Alex and Tania keep track of how many people are working in the garden
on each day. Here are their results.

2, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 1, 2

To get everything done in the garden, Tania and Alex know that at least three people need to be working on each day. When they look at the information they can see that this is not always the case.
Tania wants to organize the information so that she can share it with the group.
First, we go through and underline all of the important information. This has already been done for you.
Next, you can see that we have unorganized data. Let’s organize the data that Tania and Alex collected so that it is easier to work with.

2, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 1, 2

1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7

Here is the data reorganized numerically.
We can see that the range of numbers is from 1 to 7.
Next, we need to create a frequency table that shows this data.

# of People Working

Frequency

1

2

2

3

3

1

4

2

5

1

6

3

7

1

Vocabulary

Frequency

how often something occurs

Data

information about something or someone-usually in number form

Analyze

to look at data and draw conclusions based on patterns or numbers

Frequency table

a table or chart that shows how often something occurs

Guided Practice

Here is a list of the number of students who did not complete their homework in one month.